Paul Auster
Paul Auster
Paul Benjamin Austeris an American author and director whose writing blends absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction, and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy, Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, The Book of Illusions, and The Brooklyn Follies. His books have been translated into more than forty languages...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth3 February 1947
CityNewark, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
I really do feel part of America to my very bones; at the same time, I know that I come from somewhere else.
People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever read, and another person will say it's absolutely idiotic. I mean, there's no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.
Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.
What keeps me up at night? Anxiety. Anxiety, the inability to go to sleep, it's quite literally that.
Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.
We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from one generation to the other. We all - most of us, anyway - want connections with other people and spend our lives looking for them.
The human body is strange and flawed and unpredictable. The human body has many secrets, and it does not divulge them to anyone, except those who have learned to wait.
I think it's a very good thing to leave your country and look at it from afar.
In the mid-70s I wrote some plays, also, but it wasn't until the very late '70s when I ran into a real crisis on every level, personal, artistic, and I was absolutely broke, I'd run out of money and... hope, I guess, and I stopped writing altogether for awhile.
Reading, at the deepest level, is a physical experience. Most people are not attuned to this, most people don't learn how to read - poetry for example, or high-quality prose. They're used to reading magazines and newspapers, which are only of the mind, but not of the body.
I have difficulty orienting myself in space, and I'm probably one of the few people who gets lost in Manhattan.
I thought I was terrible [to play a cameo] and decided never to act again.
It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!
I don't have all the facts. And I might misremember. As a matter of fact, after I finished Winter Journal, I realized that I'd gotten someone's name wrong.